2010-04-11

Gone are the days when everything was on the table. The new position of not using nuclear weapons except in retalliation to nuclear attack or against rogue states is insane. Consider the huge numbers of countries that have the operational capacity to attack the US but are not part of the Nuclear Club that are now emboldened. Canada, for instance. On April 6, the same day that the Nuclear Posture Review was available to the public, the Canadian Dollar surged past the US dollar for the first time since 2008 - and this time it wasn't on the strength of $120 per barrel oil.

With a single document following-up on a quadrenniel review of defense capabilities, the possibility of surgical nuclear first strikes or nuclear retaliation to unfavourable WTO dispute resolutions are gone. Clearly Obama's Secretary of Defense is totally insane. Only the most leftist president of all time could have nominated this communist pinko tree-hugging activist to the position.

And to add injury to even more injury to the once magnificent monument that was US nuclear overpowerment - a new bilateral arms reduction treaty with Russia. Notice that "outlier states" such as Iran and North Korea aren't part of this treaty - they won't have to reduce their stockpiles of warheads. Now any country that wishes can simply build and field 1,550 operational nuclear warheads and have a larger arsenal than the US.

Even worse, for the first time in histroy , this treaty provides a means to validate and verify warhead counts. Including things like site inspections and shared telemetry. Insanity. What good is nuclear deterrance if you can't hide secret stockpiles from your rivals?

With Obama's removal of unilateral nuclear aggression from the table, there isn't much left to feast upon. Sure the United States fields the most advanced an powerful military force in the world, spending as much on defense as the rest of the top 15 nations combined. And sure the "tactical" uses for nuclear weapons such as bunker busting and overwehlming displays of power can abe met with existing conventional devices in the Massiv Ordnance family, but the sheer destructive power of nukes is not even close to being matched by anything short of sustained fire-bombing of a city - and that it is the height of barbarous inhumanity to defend nuclear weapons on the basis that they are efficient at wiping out major population centres. Still, giving them up is pure insanity.